TfL Corporate Archives webinars
The TfL Corporate Archives webinars cover exciting subjects including what we have in our collections, how our archives can be used, our favourite pieces and much more!
Each webinar is presented by one of our archives team. Taking part will give you the opportunity to ask any questions, and we'll answer every question honestly.
Our webinars are usually held once a month and are completely free.
Latest recordings
Did you miss some of our webinars? Check out the recordings from previous webinars on topics relevant to researchers, students and anyone interested in our archives.
Exploring our staff magazines
The history of the different Underground lines, staff clubs and societies, benevolent work, engineering endeavours, cartoons, tramways history, quizzes, children's stories, new buildings, and staff retirements. All these and more can be found in our collection of staff magazines dating from 1913 through to the modern day. Many of them are now available on our digital collections portal so why not watch this session and learn more about what you could find and how you can access them.
Oral history in the Archives: capturing the lived experience
A person's lived experience, the emotions they felt as a result, the sights and sounds of their day are often just as important to truly understanding the 'history' of a time or place as the recorded information about it. In this session we look at our journey to beginning an oral history collection, as well as giving examples of how we use our oral histories to promote the archive service and improve our user experiences.
Staging an exhibition: how can an Archive reveal its secrets?
In this session we present a case study on how we stage an internal, 2 day, physical exhibition. We'll then look at the things we've learnt from our experiences that we're now applying to other scenarios.
London 2012: how DID TfL do that?!?
We look back at the Olympic and Paralympic Games of London 2012 and reveal the extent of TfL's commitment to ensure their success. Network upgrades and enhancements were made, a national travel demand management programme was delivered, magenta signs popped up everywhere you looked, Route Networks were designed to aid the free flowing of traffic. The Archives team give insights from the collections into the most demanding event transport operation the nation has ever had to meet.
Explore a staff register
Our staff registers contain over 50,000 names. You never know who or what you may find! While the primary appeal of the staff registers is of course to family historians, there is a huge wealth of social and economic information held within them. Join us in this short session as we take a closer look at the types of information you may find when exploring our staff registers.
TfL Corporate Archives: What's that?
Discover how large the collection is, what it contains, how it's managed, and how it can be used. Why do we have a property deed from 1556? What do over 300 people a year find to ask us about? It's just about transport, isn't it?
Top 20 highlights
A coronation souvenir from 1911, outrage in the Thames Tunnel in 1885, sketches of C69 stock, the Naked Boy of Panyer Alley, Wilfred the Rabbit. In this talk we show you images of these items and more and explain why we think they're some of the best pieces in the collection.
Using our online catalogue for physical and hybrid collections
Our online catalogue for physical and hybrid collections contains descriptions of over 150,000 files and items but it has its quirks! We explain why the online catalogue is as it is and teach you the tricks and tips to identify the files you need.
The journey of an enquiry
You submit an enquiry, we locate the relevant information, we respond to your enquiry. Simple, right? Not so fast! We look at exactly what goes into answering an enquiry. How much time it can take, how much it can cost, and why some requests are more complex for us to answer than others.
The (maybe) great TfL archives quiz
Have you noticed how many quizzes involve a question or two about London transport? So, we thought why not bite the bullet and organise a quiz ourselves? Don't panic, you don't need to be a transport expert!
Female firsts in London's Transport
The TfL Corporate Archives collections contain numerous files on the employment of women from pre-1914 through to the modern day. And it's not just about their employment, it's about what they were doing. We explore original archival material to bring you some female firsts.
Poems on the Underground: A celebration
For World Poetry Day 2022, we held an online celebration of the Poems on the Underground programme and its poems. Following a brief history of the programme, a selection of poems was read to us, reminding listeners of the beauty around us and the resilience of the human spirit.